usb to serial adapter cable for gateway

[birchfur]

Anyone have any experience using a usb to serial adapter cable for a gateway laptop? My tuning laptop (old ibm with serial port) is on its way out so i was gonna try using my regular laptop for tuning. The gateway is running vista and usb 2.0 if that helps.

[PoBody]

Just about anything will work. I'm not too familiar with any newer serial to usb adapters but I use an older one all the time at work. One of them is a belkin and seems to have trouble with pasting large amounts of text over it, while the other handles it just fine.

The belkin
http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-Usb-Pda-Serial-Adapter/dp/B000FAIN9A/ref=sr_1_47?ie=UTF8&qid=1249362734&sr=8-47

The other one I'm not sure the brand but it looks a heck of a lot like this one and very well may be.
http://www.amazon.com/IOGear-Serial-Converter-Cable-GUC232A/dp/B000067VB7/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1249363052&sr=8-6

I'm not supporting any brands, just sharing what I've used and know to work. You could pretty much just go to amazon.com and search for serial to usb and get the cheapest one and it'll probably be fine. Most of the complaints are that they aren't working with GPS products and even then there could very well be user error as USB doesn't behave the same as Serial ports in the operating system. Either way the fact that your laptop is Gateway wont make a difference.

One last tip. I mentioned USB doesn't behave the same as Serial. Basically in some cases you have to find which USB port the device is plugged into for it to work. From then on I'd just plug it into the same port every time and there shouldn't be any mix up.